Meeting Notes - August 04, 2017

Creator Beta participants had lots of questions and feedback about Sansar during the first product discussion meetup to be held after the July 31 public debut. Hot topics at the Aug. 4 gathering included discussions about Mac support, the pending terrain engine and multiple feature requests.

During the open office hours, community members had several questions for the Sansar development team, including:

When is Mac support coming to Sansar?

For the most part, there has been little publicly-available VR hardware on the Mac platform. For this reason, Sansar development has primarily been focused on Windows users that have access to Oculus Rift or Vive hardware.

What are the future plans for socialization in Sansar?

Features to improve the social aspect are currently on the roadmap. In the short-term, we are currently working on bringing out a Discord server to have a synchronous, real time channel for everyone to chat or find friends easily until we roll out our own social features within Sansar.

When can creators expect support for action scripting and animation?

The ability to import animations is coming really soon and it is on our development roadmap, according to Sansar 3D Environment Artist Samuel Juarez (a.k.a. “Sammo”).

When will the terrain engine be available?

Soon! Testing is underway on different base templates (e.g. snow, grass, ground, etc). The Sansar team will continue fine tuning until we feel it’s in good shape to release, but it is definitely getting closer.

Is there any word on being able to list the attachments in The Sansar Store that we’ve already uploaded?

We are continuing to build out avatar customization features, such as support for importing clothing. The ability to list accessories on the Store is on the roadmap, and we are trying to get this to users as soon as we can.

Is there a development roadmap available so that creators can see what is coming soon to Sansar?

We aren’t publicly making available our internal development roadmap, but anyone can ask us directly about the status of future features during any of our recurring meetings. Our development roadmap continues to evolve as we get feedback and interact directly with the community, so we encourage participation in the meetings and Feature Requests forum.

Has there been a change to the height of the male avatar collision cage? It seems like the male avatar collision cage is now about 11 inches lower (closer to height of female avatars).

No changes were made to the collision cage properties for any of the avatars.

When will text chat be accessible in VR mode?

We recognize that some users may also want to see text chat regardless of how they access Sansar, so our development team is working to improve the communication experience between all users. No specifics have been announced yet, but stay tuned for more communication improvements!

Will there be some sort of progress indicator during the loading of Sansar experiences?

For users with low bandwidth connections, we know that the wait can be frustrating while loading a Sansar experience. One creator suggests that the loading screen should have some text that explains what is happening during the wait, such as a percentage progress indicator or other text. It was also communicated that this issue may be important to those who may have data limits on their Internet access, as they may want to be informed about how much data they are using. This feedback has also been communicated in the Feature Requests forum and the Sansar development team is investigating.

Will we be able to search for experiences using the Atlas within the Sansar app?

Yes! It is on the roadmap and we are working on making it available soon. In the meantime, you can search for experiences using the search field on the upper right of the web version of the Atlas.

Will there be official Sansar instructional videos made available to help creators and newcomers?We are working on it! In the meantime, the community has already created some great tutorial videos such as these by Strawberry Singh.